Using Lightroom as a business presentation and marketing tool

by George Mann

Because Adobe Lightroom marketing has so far only been targeted at professional and enthusiast level photographers, the consumer can be forgiven for thinking that Lightroom is useful as an organizing, editing and presentation tool for photographers only. The slideshow and web modules in Lightroom seem to be designed with one purpose in mind and that is to present the photographer's images to his image buying clients.

I discovered this week that Lightroom is also very useful as a presentation and marketing tool for other businesses, especially when the product description changes frequently or is never the same. An international artwork and handicrafts buyer client of mine approached me recently, to help him put together a system for cataloging and presenting a very large collection of various items that change constantly.

His biggest problem was that he needed to photograph a large number of items quickly and on the same day present them to his clients, who are located in various parts of the world. He had been using photographic prints and courier services, but he wanted to speed up the process, so that he could get an edge on his competitors.

Since he already owned a website, I suggested that he learn how to make web pages and upload the digital images to his website at the end of each day of photographing new items. Then he could call his client to discuss the items in question while they both look at the same images on the web.

He agreed that web pages would be the best solution to his problem, but he wanted one tool that he could use to organize his product images, correct bad exposures and crop the images, create the website pages, and send the web page to his website.

As you can probably guess by now, that tool turned out to be Adobe Lightroom. I was able to teach him how to import, organize, edit, create his web pages, and upload to the internet in one fairly long but easy training session. Now he is set up with a new sales and marketing tool that none of his competitors have, not until they find out what he is using and how easy it is to use.

1 Comments

Scott
2007-03-21 22:21:26

Probably pretty easy to figure out considering that Lightroom automatically puts "Web Gallery created by Adobe Photoshop Lightroom" in each gallery (at least by default).

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